Success!

...or at least enough success to want to try it out again!  So let me start at the beginning.  I was the beneficiary of a gift certificate from Fundametals, because I volunteered to help out at the registration desk at Art Bliss.  Seriously not a hardship!  It gave me a chance to meet everyone!  After the dust settled I used my gift certificate to buy the Ice Resin kit.  I had heard the raves at Art Bliss among other locations and thought it would be cool to give it a try.  The other inspiration for trying out resin was this:

My very first duty station in the Air Force was Yokota AB - which is on the outskirts of Tokyo.  Many, many good things happened for me there - least of which was meeting my future husband - but I also had a couple wonderful, crafty friends not intimidated by a foreign country when it comes to craftiness.  We all fell in love with washi paper, especially my friend Michelle and I.  We covered everything in that stuff, and I was compelled to buy extra stock before I left.  The stash of paper was largely forgotten, although thanks to the sturdy tube, it survived multiple moves.  Literally the first time I opened it, in years, was when I started this project.

Sunday I opened up the tube of paper and unwrapped the wonderful Amate Studio bezels I ordered from Rings-n-Things.  I followed the brief instructions that came with the resin to the letter, but free lanced a couple things that worked pretty well.  First, because the bails on the bezel meant they wouldn't lay flat, I filled two dishes with rice so that I could get them mostly level. 

The other idea was to mix the two halves of the resin in a zip lock bag, and then trim one corner to squirt the resin.  This worked okay, except you need to make sure the bag is really, really zipped tight.  We had a blowout that might have been tragic had we not caught it really quickly.  (Was I wearing old clothes?  Of course not.  I had not changed after church.  Did I not learn anything from my mother?)

Per sage advice I got from Erin Prais-Hintz I covered the dishes to keep out dust, and then put them under a lamp to help them cure and to help remove bubbles.  Note the stern sign.


So enough chit chat already, here are the results.  As you probably know, getting a picture of a resin pendant is tough to get without glare, so here are two views.


Remember the cutie pies I wrote about yesterday?  Well Rings-n-Things had cuff link bezels.  My brother collects them, and my husband and father-in-law like them too.  They are about 1/2 to 3/4 inch squares, so hopefully they fall into the quirky-classy category and not the cheesy category.

You know what this means don't you?  I have found a way to give every living member of my family, male and female, jewelry for Christmas.  

One other small problem to work out next time - sticky rice!  Resin that over flowed or I slopped stuck rice to the backs/sides of the bezels.  Most broke off pretty easily, except for these two.  I think paint scraper razor kind of thing will fix this.